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Originally Posted by Cyber Wolf
Let's use Sprint as the example: Sprint would need an offical validation of someone being who they say they are before opening an account. That would require either Sprint, a third party or the customer to go somewhere to submit a strand of hair to be tested and compared with what's recorded with his SSN. That's a lot of extra time and extra steps just to get a cell phone. It's just easier, faster and less of a headache for everyone involved to just rely on offical documents, detatched as they are.
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Funny how when Sprint needed to contact me to collect "my" bill, they were apparently able to do so without a great deal of trouble. I doubt very much that the person masquerading as me provided Sprint with my home telephone number - yet that's where they called me. Granted, not everyone applying for a cellphone account is going to have a home phone number to call for verification
before the account is established, but at least in my case, why
didn't Sprint call and check it out? As someone else wrote in this thread, they don't care. They're thinking about all the legitimate, paying business they gain by making it all so easy and convenient for the new customer, and if they get ripped off...well, they can always intimidate a certain percentage of people into paying a bill they didn't run up, and simply raise their rates and charges to make up for the rest.
Honestly, I'm not sure that there's more than the most tenuous connection between this "identity giveaway" problem and the whole national security issue brought up by another poster. The latter is a complex can of worms that I'm not prepared to address. All that I'm saying is that the companies who pull this kind of crap need to be reigned in - either voluntarily, or at the direction of some governmental authority - so if they
choose to give away people's identity and grant somebody credit on the basis of information that a kindergardner could track down, they would be prohibited from harassing people or reporting bad credit when they get ripped off.